1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to children's drawing toys and aides, and more specifically to toys and devices that assist children in tracing and drawing images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Children enjoy drawing pictures of familiar items and perhaps coloring them in afterward. However, drawing a picture as you want it to look involves motor skills, spatial relations, and an artistic sensibility that elude most people, be they children or adults. Freehand drawing can be extremely frustrating, as poor drawings serve as a disincentive for many people to continue to draw. The use of stencils provides accuracy in reproducing figures, but stencils are often limited to letters and numbers and do not afford the user any sense of originality.
One common way a person can accurately reproduce an image is by tracing the image on tracing paper. Tracing paper is more light-transmissible than ordinary paper, so that the placement of a sheet of tracing paper atop an image allows the image to be seen through the tracing paper. The would-be artist merely goes over the lines of the original image with a pen, pencil, or marker on the tracing paper.
There are limitations to this method. First, tracing paper is typically of lower quality than ordinary paper. By merely seeing the tracing paper as the substrate for the drawn image, one readily knows the image was traced. Tracing paper is also typically less durable than regular paper; indeed, when tracing paper is folded, the crease where it was folded leaves a visible mark. Tracing also forces the tracer to create an image that is the same size as the original. It is therefore difficult to change the size of the image being traced. What one is left with when one traces an image is an overly small or large image on poor quality paper that everyone instantly knows was not drawn from scratch.